Federal Court Orders Romanian Website Operator to Take Down Canadian Court Decisions Under Privacy Statute

The Federal Court of Canada has ordered a Romanian company and its sole proprietor to cease publishing online any Canadian court or tribunal decisions containing personal information. It has also awarded damages against the company’s owner. The decision flows from an application made pursuant to s. 14 of the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act(PIPEDA). The applicant had complained to the Privacy Commissioner of Canada regarding the activities of the defendant and his website Globe24h.com. The Commissioner ruled the complaint well-founded (my comment on this finding is here). However, since the Commissioner has no power to make binding orders or to award damages, the applicant pursued the matter in court.(Note that the lack of order-making powers is considered by many to be a weakness of PIPEDA, and the Commissioner has suggested to Parliament that it might be time for greater enforcement powers.)

Globe24h.com is a Romania-based website operated by the respondent Radulescu. The site re-publishes public documents from a number of jurisdictions, including Canada. The Canadian content is scraped from CanLII and from court and tribunal websites. This scraping is contrary to the terms of use of those sites. The Canadian court websites and CanLII also prevent the indexing of their websites by search engines; this means that a search for an individual by name will not turn up court or tribunal decisions in which that individual is named. This practice is meant to balance the privacy of individuals with the public interest in having broad access to court and tribunal decisions. Such decisions may contain considerable amounts of personal information as they may relate to any kind of legal dispute including family law matters, employment-related disputes, discrimination complaints, immigration proceedings, bankruptcy cases, challenges to decisions on pensions or employment insurance, criminal matters, disputes between neighbors, and so on. In contrast, the Globe24h.com website is indexed by search engines; as a result, the balance attempted to be struck by courts and tribunals in Canada is substantially undermined.

The applicant in this case was one of many individuals who had complained to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner (OPC) after finding that a web search for their names returned results containing personal information from court decisions. The applicant, like many others, had sought to have his personal information removed from the Globe24h website. However, the “free removal” option offered by the site could take half a year or more to process. The alternative was to pay to have the content removed. Those who had opted to pay for removal found that they might have to pay again and again if the same information was reproduced in more than one document or in multiple versions of the decision hosted on the Globe24h web site.

The first issue considered by the Federal Court was whether PIPEDA could apply extraterritorially to Globe24h.com. In general, a country’s laws are not meant to apply outside its boundaries. Although the Federal Court referred to the issue as one of extraterritorial application of laws, it is more akin to what my co-authors and I have called extended territoriality. In other words, PIPEDA will apply to activities carried out in Canada and with impacts in Canada – even though the actors may be located outside of Canada. The internet makes such situations much more common. In this case, Radulescu engaged in scraping data from websites based in Canada; the information he collected included personal information of Canadians. He then, through his company, charged individuals fees to have their personal information removed from his website. The Court found that in these circumstances, PIPEDA would apply.

It was clear that the respondent had collected, used and disclosed the personal information of the applicant without his consent. Although Radulescu did not appear before the Federal Court, he had interacted with the OPC during the course of the investigation of the complaint against Globe24h.In that context, he had argued that he was entitled to benefit from the exception in PIPEDA which permitted the collection, use and disclosure of personal information without consent where it is for journalistic purposes. There is little case law that addresses head-on the scope of the “journalistic purposes” exception under PIPEDA. Justice Mosely found that the criteria proposed by the Canadian Association of Journalists, and supported by the OPC, provide a “reasonable framework” to define journalistic purposes:

. . . only where its purpose is to (1) inform the community on issues the community values, (2) it involves an element of original production, and (3) it involves a “self-conscious discipline calculated to provide an accurate and fair description of facts, opinion and debate at play within a situation.” (at para 68)

Justice Mosley found that “journalistic purposes” required something more than making court decisions available for free over the internet without any value-added content. He also noted that the statutory exception applies only where the collection, use or disclosure of personal information is for journalistic purposes and for no otherpurpose. Here, he found that the respondent had other purposes – namely to profit from charging people to remove their personal information from the website.

The respondent had also argued that he was entitled to benefit from the exception to the consent requirement because the information he collected, used and disclosed was ‘publicly available’. This exception is contained in PIPEDA and in regulations pertaining to publicly available information. While court and tribunal decisions fall within the definition of publicly available information, the exception to the consent requirement is only available where the collection, use or disclosure of the information relates “directly to the purpose for which the information appears in the record or document.” (Regs, s. 1(d)). In this case, Justice Mosley found that the respondent’s purpose did not relate directly to the reasons why the personal information was included in the decisions. Specifically, the inclusion of personal information in court decisions is to further the goals of the open courts principle, whereas, in the words of Justice Mosley, the respondent’s purpose “serves to undermine the administration of justice by potentially causing harm to participants in the justice system.” (at para 78)

PIPEDA contains a requirement that limits data collection, use or disclosure by an organization to only where it is “for purposes that a reasonable person would consider are appropriate in the circumstances.” (s. 5(3)). Justice Mosely noted that the Canadian Judicial Council’s policies on the online publication of court decisions strongly discourages the indexing of such decisions by search engines in order to strike a balance between open courts and privacy. This led Justice Mosely to conclude that the respondent did not have a bona fide business interest in making court decisions available in a way that permitted their indexing by search engines. Therefore the collection, use and disclosure of this information was not for purposes that a reasonable person would consider to be appropriate.

Having found that the respondent had breached PIPEDA, Justice Mosley next considered the issue of remedies. The situation was complicated in this case by the fact that the respondent is based in Romania. This raised issues of whether the court should make orders that would have an impact in Romania, as well as the issue of enforceability. The applicant was also pursuing separate remedies in Romania, and Justice Mosley noted that a court order from Canada might assist in these objectives. The OPC argued that it would be appropriate for the Court to make an order with a broader impact than just the applicant’s particular circumstances. The number of other complaints received by both CanLII and the OPC about personal information contained in decisions hosted on the Romanian site were indicative of a systemic issue. Justice Mosley was also influenced by the OPC’s argument that a broad order could be used by the applicant and by others to persuade search engines to de-index the pages of the respondent’s websites. Accepting that PIPEDA enabled him to address systemic and not just individual problems, Justice Mosely issued a declaration that the respondent had violated PIPEDA, and ordered that he remove all Canadian court and tribunal decisions that contain personal information. He also ordered that the respondent take steps to ensure that these decisions are removed from search engine caches. The respondent was also ordered to refrain from any further copying or publishing of Canadian court or tribunal decisions containing personal information in a manner that would violate PIPEDA.

The applicant also sought damages for breach of PIPEDA. Damages awards have been a weak spot under PIPEDA. The Federal Court has been extremely conservative in awarding damages; this tendency has not been helped by the fact that the overwhelming majority of applications have been brought by self-represented litigants. In this case, Justice Mosley accepted that the breach was egregious, and noted the practice of the respondent to profit from exploiting the personal information of Canadians. He also noted that the level of disclosure of personal information was extensive because of the bulk downloading and publishing of court decisions. Finally, he noted that the respondent “has also acted in bad faith in failing to take responsibility and rectify the problem” (at para 103). In the circumstances, one might have expected an order of damages far in excess of the modest $5000 ultimately ordered by Justice Mosely. This amount seems disproportionate to the nature of the breach, as well as to the impact it had on the applicant and the extensive steps he has had to take to try to address the problem. Even though recovering any amount from the respondent might be no more than a pipe dream in the circumstances, the amount set in this case would seem to lack any deterrent effect and is hardly proportionate to the nature of the breach.

Overall, this decision is an important one. It confirms the application of PIPEDA to the collection, use or disclosure of personal information of Canadians that is linked to Canada, even where the respondent is located in another country. It also provides clarification of the exceptions to consent for journalistic purposes and for publicly available information. In this regard, the court’s careful reading of these exceptions prevents them from being used as a broad licence to exploit personal information. The court’s reasoning with respect to its declaration and its order is also useful, particularly as it applies to the sanctioning of offshore activities. The only weakness is in the award of damages; this is a recurring issue with PIPEDA and one that may take legislative intervention to address.